Mikhail Gorbachev Former Soviet leader has died at 91

Breaking news Mikhail Gorbachev Former Soviet leader has died at 91. Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev addresses a group of 150 business executives in San Francisco, June 5, 1990. Russian news agencies reported that former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev has died at 91, citing a statement from the Central Clinical Hospital.

Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, who played a central role in ending the Cold War, died Tuesday at the age of 91 on 30 Aug 2022.

Russian media reported his death, citing the hospital that was treating him as saying he died of a "serious and protracted disease," without providing more information.

Mikhail Gorbachev died at 91

Gorbachev's trademark policies of glasnost and perestroika helped open up the Soviet economy and liberalize society in the late 1980s, confront its past and engage with Western leaders on arms control. He also oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops from about a decadelong military campaign in Afghanistan, as well as the USSR's handling of Chernobyl.

Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990, he was seen by many abroad, including President Ronald Reagan, as a visionary. But his legacy is complicated at home, where many viewed him as the man who engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Mikhail Gorbachev Never Want to see Global Conflicts

Gorbachev never wanted to see global conflict again, leaving him determined to make the world less suspicious of communism.

He was a young star in the Communist Party, and when he was named Soviet leader in 1985, he was already at work engaging Western leaders like British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who had given him a historic endorsement in 1984.

"I like Mr. Gorbachev," she said. "We can do business together."

Andrei Grachev, one of Gorbachev's closest advisers, likened that endorsement to a Frank Sinatra song.

"If you use the phrase from Sinatra's song, 'If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.' So if he could say it to himself that he could do it with Thatcher, he would be ready and capable of doing it with anyone else," Grachev says.

Grachev traveled with his boss to Paris in 1985 for a news conference with French President François Mitterrand. Gorbachev's staff was used to distributing scripted questions to Soviet reporters. But Gorbachev did the unthinkable: He fielded whatever questions reporters felt like asking.

"As he said, 'I have my shirt wet, like working in the field. It was really hot to me,' " Grachev recalls, "because he had to answer quite a lot of questions at the time."

Gorbachev, a son of a poor farming family, had arrived on the world stage.

"That was, kind of, the pride of a peasant who had accomplished something, of which he was proud," Grachev says.

Source: NPR News